Technology Trends – Impacts for 2018 and Beyond

We examine the technology trends that have impacted the current year and will continue for the foreseeable future. Within the technology sector, there are several areas that are exceedingly impactful to businesses trying to cultivate new clients and customers.

Mobile and the Web

A survey of 4,000 18–34-year-olds across the United States, U.K., Germany, Australia, Japan, and France, as well as 1,016 adults 35 years old or older in the U.S. found nearly 70 percent can expect all purchasing to be transacted digitally. This same group reported they mainly utilize SMS messaging for communication, whether it’s personal or with a business, and they expect immediate responses to any inquiries.

Millennials and the new Generation Z have grown up in the smartphone era and demand companies to offer services that caters to their specific expectations.

The mobile device is essentially an extension of their persona, and companies will need to adjust their entire business models to a mobile-first strategy that answers fundamental questions: How will customers order via mobile? How can workers access important data and instantly share content via mobile?

Mobile’s usage will shift every facet of commerce. For example, mobile video ad spending is predicted to grow nearly 50 percent to $18 billion in 2018, with a 1.5% decline in fixed online video ads. It’s another movement towards mobile as the primary way people interact, live and work.

Increases in IoT

According to data from Gartner, there are already more IoT devices than people on the planet, and by 2020 this number will surpass 20 billion, and the spending on these devices in just 2017 will reach $2 trillion. As growth accelerates in both Greenfield and Brownfield applications, companies will need to quickly adjust their IT infrastructure and team resources to get the most out of IoT-connected devices.

Driving this growth is multiple factors, including the falling prices of sensors, better security standards for IoT-produced data, and a growing understanding of the benefits of interconnected data access. These devices are already transforming healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, utilities, mining, construction, and a variety of other verticals. As organizations continue to identify the LOB that would benefit most from an interconnected enabled ecosystem, partners that can build a customized IoT value chain will be highly sought after.

But before you are go IoT you must be Cloud enabled.

It’s all in the Clouds

Supporting all of these trends are cloud services. Mobile devices save and pull information from the cloud, AI’s computing power is drawn from shared cloud resources, and all of the sensor-based IoT data is analyzed within a cloud structure.

Data storage will need to increase quickly to manage all of this data, and the cloud providers are meeting the challenge with larger-capacity storage equipment. A Cisco survey estimates there will be a total global storage capacity of 600 EB (exabytes) by the end of 2017, but there will be a massive surge to 1.1 ZB (zettabytes) by the end of 2018.

Further growth in cloud services will see market consolidation, with the biggest players, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft capturing more than 80% of all cloud platform revenue by 2020. The competition for such services will remain fierce, as these companies pull a substantial amount of their total revenue from their cloud offerings, and will need to stay competitive to protect profits. Another trend will be the Microsoft Azure Stack driving forward increases in private and hybrid clouds in 2018 and beyond as companies flock to the security benefits of such environments.

An experienced consultancy has the pulse of the pace of change and can help companies proactively adjust to new technical realities. Whether it’s creating a mobile-first site, moving systems to the cloud, or exploring how IoT analytics can boost efficiency, the experts at TechBlocks can provide guidance. Visit www.tblocks.com to learn more.

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